When it comes to voting, there are basically two arguments: a civic one, which states that voting is the moral duty of every able citizen in a democracy, and an economic one, which states that voting is a fruitless endeavor in a game with terrible odds. Perhaps the economists had the right of it. A massive database with 191 million voter records has made its way online, and the strangest part is, no one can quite figure out who put it there or when it will be taken down.
Chris Vickery, an independent security researcher, discovered the database and reported it to DataBreaches.net, which keeps track of huge online security gaffes, just as the name suggests. From there, Vickery and DataBreaches worked together with Steve Ragan of security news blog Salted Hash to investigate where the information comes from, how it got online and how to get rid of it.
First, the bad news: The data breach is massive, and contains tons of information that you’d probably rather keep private. Every state compiles voting records after each election, and while the information is not usually public, it’s not impossible to obtain legally, either. In order to vote, citizens disclose their names, addresses, birth dates, genders, ethnicities, dates of voter registration, party affiliation, e-mail addresses (optional) and party affiliations.
IT GETS WORSE: THE DATABASE CONTAINS RECORDS OF THE CANDIDATES FOR WHOM PEOPLE VOTED SINCE 2000.
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